Advances: Pizza is worth the wait

At last, the revelation you've been waiting for - pizzas are health food. Or at least, they can be if made the right way, according to research published in Chicago yesterday by food chemists from the University of Maryland. They found it was possible to enhance the antioxidant content of pizza if you used wholemeal flour, gave the dough at least two days to rise, and cooked in an oven hotter than 270 degrees for longer than seven minutes.

Antioxidants protect cells from damage caused by unstable molecules known as free radicals, and may lower the risk of cancer and heart disease. "The reason we chose pizza is just because it is a very popular food product," said one of the researchers, Jeffrey Moore. "So we thought if we could find ways to improve its properties, doing this for such a product could have a larger impact on public health."

He said antioxidant levels rose by up to 82 per cent with higher baking temperatures, and by up to 100 per cent with longer fermentation times, but wholemeal dough was best because most of the antioxidants are in the bran and endosperm components that are usually removed from refined flour.

When this column read the research to George Pompei, of Pompei's pizza restaurant at Bondi, he said most Sydney pizzas would fail on all counts. "In most places, the dough is left to prove for less than a day, and then they pile on the toppings and don't cook it properly. So the pizza ends up fermenting in your stomach and making you feel uncomfortable," he said.

Pompei's dough is left to prove for at least five days, he said, and cooked at 330 degrees. But his flour is not wholemeal. "Maybe I'll try a mixture of flours from now on".